The content of classroom teaching and teaching style used to deliver the content are not the same. The same classroom content can be delivered with different learning styles, e.g., lecturing versus active learning. Active learning techniques can boost student achievement. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education continues to struggle to engage, effectively teach, and retain post-secondary students, both generally and particularly among women and students of color. Some analyses suggest that increasing retention by just ten percent of undergraduate STEM students could address anticipated STEM workforce shortfalls. Attempts to reform undergraduate STEM education to use more active teaching strategies that have been shown to increase retention have been on-going for decades, with hundreds of millions of dollars invested by national and federal agencies. Even for those students retained in STEM, growing evidence from discipline-based education researchers and others suggest widespread ineffectiveness of current university teaching practices in promoting learning. In contrast, active learning pedagogies of varying quality have been repeatedly demonstrated to produce superior learning gains with large effect sizes compared to lecture-based pedagogies. Shifting large numbers of STEM faculty to include any active learning in their teaching may retain and more effectively educate far more students than having a few faculty completely transform their teaching.
Approaches to evaluate learning techniques have included in-person observation and video recordings. These approaches can be intrusive, however. The presence of an observer or video recorder in a classroom can have the effect of causing a teacher to alter his or her style of teaching. Moreover, teaching style may vary from one class session to the next depending upon the subject matter being taught, and therefore, making just a few observations may not provide an accurate assessment of learning style used in the class. However, sending an observer to every class or filming every class can be expensive and time consuming. Films of a class typically must be reviewed eventually by a human observer.
Transcription of audio recordings of classroom content, e.g., the words that are spoken, does not necessarily reveal teaching style since the words spoken do not necessarily reveal the level of active participation by students. Moreover, if done manually by human observers, evaluation of audio recordings to assess the amount of active learning can be time consuming and expensive. Thus, there has been a need for improvement in techniques to evaluate classroom learning techniques.